Bernie Goes Socialist

Democratic presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders, seen here on the campaign trail in Dover, New Hampshire, September 1, 2019

Until yesterday, the actual differences between Bernie Sanders’s policies and Elizabeth Warren’s were ones of degree—and of labeling. As to the latter, Bernie calls himself a democratic socialist, though he cites as one of his forebears Franklin Roosevelt, who, while he certainly established a social democratic program—Social Security—wouldn’t make it into the Socialist Hall of Fame. For her part, Warren also cites FDR, and the other Roosevelt (TR), too, as her influences, though she labels them—and herself—as capitalists.

As to the differences in degree, they’re apparent in parts of Sanders’s macroeconomic remake plan, which he released yesterday. In it, for example, the senator from Vermont calls for requiring corporations to have 45 percent of their board members elected by their employees, whereas the plan from the senator from Massachusetts called for just 40 percent. Hardly a major difference, that.

Sanders also echoes Warren’s plan requiring large businesses to obtain a federal corporate charter from the Department of Commerce, which forces directors and executives to “consider the interests of all of the stakeholders in a company,” including workers, customers, and communities as well as shareholders. The difference, again, is in degree: Warren’s corporate charter kicks in for corporations with over $1 billion in revenue, while Sanders’s starts at $100 million, while adding all publicly traded companies. Again, a difference in degree, though a somewhat broader one.

But in one key particular, Bernie’s plan for remaking the economy does differ from Warren’s in kind, not just degree. It calls for corporations to give 2 percent of their stock every year to a worker-owned and -run trust fund, until that fund controls 20 percent of the company’s stock. By collecting dividends, those workers would get substantial capital income on top of their paychecks. And by holding 20 percent of the company’s shares, and comprising 45 percent of its board, they’d be able to counter—substantially, though not entirely—the influence of those outside investors who may want the company to shortchange its workers through, for instance, offshoring work, or opposing unionization, or employing temps in permanent jobs.

In that particular, the Sanders proposal moves in the direction that Sweden’s labor movement sought to move in the 1970s with the Meidner Plan—a proposal that would, like Sanders’s, have gradually transferred a company’s stock to a worker-owned and -run fund, until, unlike Sanders’s, it topped 50 percent, giving workers clear ownership of Sweden’s corporations. In a sense, the Meidner Plan was to 20th-century European democratic socialism what Gettysburg was to the Confederacy: the wall they reached but never crossed. Swedish business pushed back so hard that the Social Democrats, who’d governed Sweden for the preceding 44 years, fell from power in the mid-1970s, and by the time they regained power in the ’80s, they had given up on pushing for the transfer of ownership that had been the essence of the original proposal.

In a number of their proposals, Warren and Sanders are now adapting some of the more successful European social democratic achievements to fit American realities. In Germany, corporations are compelled to give half their board seats to worker representatives (though the CEO can break tie votes). In consequence, while German corporations have spread production facilities throughout the world just as their American counterparts have (see, for instance, the Mercedes, Volkswagen, and Siemens facilities here in the States), they’ve been compelled to keep many of their high-value production jobs at home, as has been anything but the case among U.S. corporations.

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Note, however, that neither Sanders nor Warren is proposing a 50-50 board split, nor is Sanders proposing transferring half the stock to employees. I suspect they have concluded if they went that far, they’d encounter a level of business and financial pushback that would dwarf anything the Swedish left experienced when it proposed the Meidner Plan. That said, by American standards, both candidates have pushed the reform of American capitalism in a far more social direction than anyone could have imagined before 2016, and Bernie’s new proposal pushes it farther still. Whatever the fate of his campaign, it’s something that the Congressional Progressive Caucus, as well as the masses of American social democrats, should take up.

No capitalism is more anti-social than ours; it will take the kind of radical restructuring that both Warren and Sanders have proposed—very much including worker ownership—to create the more egalitarian economy this nation so obviously needs.

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